The Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry has urged the Nigeria Revenue Service to grant a one-month extension for the filing of Company Income Tax returns.
The appeal followed widespread technical glitches that occurred on the newly introduced Rev360 tax platform.
LCCI’s director-general, Chinyere Almona, made the appeal on Wednesday in Lagos via a statement. She also appealed to the NRS to waive penalties for companies that were unable to file their returns by the Tuesday statutory deadline due to the portal’s failure.
Ms Almona explained that the prolonged downtime experienced on the Rev360 platform on the deadline day prevented thousands of companies from completing their tax filings.
She noted that though some businesses waited until the last minute to file their returns, the widespread system failure could not be blamed on taxpayers.
“Rev360, inaugurated about two months ago, suffered prolonged downtime on Tuesday, leaving thousands of companies unable to file with only hours to spare. This is a platform failure, not a taxpayer failure,” Ms Almona said.
The LCCI chief noted that while teething challenges were expected with a newly deployed digital platform, inaugurating it close to a major statutory deadline exposed businesses to avoidable risks.
According to Ms Almona, the heavy volume of last-minute users reveals shortcomings in the platform’s capacity, resulting in login failures, validation errors and unsuccessful submissions when taxpayers need reliable access.
She therefore appealed to the NRS to immediately extend the CIT filing deadline by one month and waive all penalties for companies that attempted to file on or before the deadline but were prevented from doing so by the system outage.
She also appealed to the revenue agency to urgently improve the platform’s capacity and reliability ahead of subsequent filing deadlines.
“The LCCI appeals to the NRS to announce the extension and penalty waiver as soon as possible to avoid apprehension and confusion within the business community,” Ms Almona said.
She added that, in the interest of ensuring a smooth implementation of the new tax administration system, granting an extension was necessary. According to her, adopting a cautious regulatory approach during the rollout of the new platform will help build taxpayers’ confidence while supporting compliance.
(NAN)
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